This invention relates generally to social networking, and more particularly to extending social content outside of a social networking system by personalizing a third-party website with content from the social networking system.
In a typical social networking system, such as a social networking website, users set up their user profiles and then establish connections with other users of the social networking system. The users often provide information about themselves expressly to the social networking system, such as demographic information and/or a list of the users' interests. Users may also provide information about themselves implicitly to the social networking system, through their actions on the system and interactions with other users. In this way, a social networking system can obtain a rich set of social information about its users, which may be used in a great many ways to enhance a user's experience online.
However, most websites that a user visits online do not have access to this rich set of social information, and in fact most do not even know the identity of their users. Assembling enough information about a user's social connections for these purposes typically requires a system to interact with a large number of users over an extended period of time, and most websites do not have the resources, expertise, or user base required to build and maintain this social information. Accordingly, these systems will offer an inferior experience, since any customization or personalization provided by these sites is unlikely to reflect information about the user's social connections and their actions.
For example, a news website may provide a number of web pages that each contain a story about a particular event. Users of a social networking system may comment about the story, even specifically referring to that web page offered by the news website. However, without having access to this social information about the users, the news website cannot leverage on these useful interactions to enhance the experience of other users who visit the news website. Accordingly, it would be beneficial to offer a mechanism to third-party websites, which are in a domain that is different from a domain of a social networking system, to provide personalized content for their users based on social information about those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the social networking system.